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“I JUST CAME across this email,” began the content, an extended overdue reply. But I knew the sender was lying. He’d opened my email nearly six months ago. On a Mac. In Palo Alto. At night.

I knew this because I used to be running the email tracking service Streak, which notified me the moment my message have been opened. It told me where, when, and on what kind of device it absolutely was read. With Streak enabled, I felt as an inside trader whenever I glanced at my inbox, privy to details that gave me maybe a little too much information. And That I certainly wasn’t alone.

There are several 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for everyone on the planet, each day. Over forty percent of these emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company which also builds anti-tracking tools.

The tech is fairly simple. Tracking clients embed a type of code in the body of an email-usually in a 1×1 pixel image, so tiny it’s invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. Whenever a recipient opens the e-mail, the tracking client understands that pixel has become downloaded, as well as where as well as on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the process for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech businesses like Facebook and Twitter followed suit within their ongoing pursuit to profile and predict our behavior online.

But lately, a surprising-and growing-variety of tracked emails are now being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We happen to be in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founding father of OMC. “It’s the wild, wild west out there.”

Based on OMC’s data, a complete 19 percent of all “conversational” email has become tracked. That’s 1 in 5 of the emails you obtain out of your friends. And you probably never noticed.

“Surprisingly, nevertheless there is a huge literature on web tracking, best email tracking software has seen little research,” noted an October 2017 paper authored by three Princeton computer scientists. This all implies that billions of emails are sent every day to millions of people that have never consented by any means to be tracked, but are being tracked nonetheless. And Seroussi believes that some, at least, will be in serious danger because of this.

As recently since the mid-2000s, email tracking was almost entirely unknown to the mainstream public. Then in 2006, an early tracking service called ReadNotify made waves each time a lawsuit said that HP had used the product to trace the origins of a scandalous email who had leaked towards the press. The intrusiveness (and simplicity) of the tactic came as something of any shock, even though newsletter services, salespeople, and marketers had long used email tracking to collect data.

Seroussi states that Gmail was the ice breaker here-he points to the period when sponsored links first started arriving within our inboxes, based on tracked data. During the time it seemed invasive, even unsettling. “Now,” he says, “it’s common knowledge and everyone’s fine by using it.” Gmail’s foray was the signal flare; when advertisers and salespeople realized they also could send targeted ads based upon tracked data, with little lasting pushback, the practice grew more pervasive.

“I do not know of a single established sales team in [the online sales industry] that will not use some form of email open tracking,” says John-Henry Scherck, a content marketing pro as well as the principal consultant at Growth Plays. “I think it will probably be a matter of time before either everyone uses them,” Scherck says, “or major email providers block them entirely.”

That’s partly to do with spam. “Competent spammers will track any activity on your email simply because they tend to buy entire lists of addresses and definately will actively try to rule out spam traps or unused emails,” says Andrei Afloarei, a pnifcc researcher with Bitdefender. “If you click on any link in just one with their messages they are going to know your address will be used and can actually make them send more spam your path.”

But marketing and internet based sales-even spammers-are will no longer accountable for the majority of the tracking. “Now, it’s the major tech companies,” Seroussi says. “Amazon has been making use of them a whole lot, Facebook has become using them. Facebook is the top tracker besides MailChimp.” When Facebook sends an email notifying you about new activity on the account, “it opens an app in background, now Facebook knows what your location is, the product you’re using, the last picture you’ve taken-they get everything.”